The present inventive concept relates to computer systems and, in particular, to backing up physical and virtual machines in a distributed computer system.
Distributed computing systems, sometimes also referred to as cloud computing systems, are used to provide services to electronic devices which may be operated by end users. In a cloud computing system, the physical machine architecture is hidden from the end user. The physical machines can include servers, network storage devices, computing devices, network routers, network gateways, wireless/wired network interface devices, etc. However, because services are deployed on a physical machine architecture which is hidden from end users, it can be managed, upgraded, replaced or otherwise changed by a system administrator (operator) without the end users being aware of or affected by the change.
Data servers and associated network communication devices are example physical machines that can be included in a data center. The data servers perform computer operations that provide a plurality of guest virtual machines (VMs) within a plurality of VM clusters. Each VM cluster can include a plurality of guest VMs, and each VM cluster can reside on different data servers or may be distributed across more than one data server.
Thus, much of the data for any distributed computing system is now held in VMs, i.e. virtual machines including virtualized data and applications. When the physical machine or the VM fails, it has to be recreated from a backup. Tools designed for backing up physical machines are not easily adapted for backing up VMs. Using these legacy backup tools to backup a virtual environment may cause issues related to capabilities of the backup tools, over complicated fixes to retrofit the tools and the cost associated therewith, which may force organizations to make compromises that reduce the likelihood of realizing the full potential of their virtualization investments.
Companies, such as Veeam Software AG of Switzerland and and CA Technologies of New York, provide backup and replication tools designed for the virtual environment rather than traditional backup tools designed to work with only physical machines. However, improved backup tools for both physical and virtual machines may be desirable.